Artena

Until 1873 the town was called Montefortino. Then it took the name of Artena, the Volscian city that Antonio Nibby had identified with this site on the strength of the great cyclopean walls on the mountain above the village and of a passage in Livy: a fascinating identification, and one never proved. It is Livy again who tells how in 404 BC the Romans stormed the Artena of the Volscians thanks to the treachery of a slave, who showed the soldiers the way up to the citadel where the defenders had shut themselves in.

The harshest story, though, is that of the Colonna. Lords of the place from 1475, they were declared enemies of the popes, and the town paid for them: it was devastated in 1526 by Clement VII, in 1543 by Paul III and in 1557 by Paul IV, who outlawed the inhabitants of Montefortino simply because they had stayed loyal to the Colonna, had the town levelled, and had the ruins ploughed and sown with salt. In 1614 debts forced the Colonna to sell the fief to cardinal Scipione Borghese, who rebuilt it: the Arco Borghese, the central square, the Via del Borgo and the convent of San Francesco are his. And in 1849 Giuseppe Garibaldi, in flight from Rome, slept here one night before setting off for Romagna.